Tanuja Chandra's Hope and a Little Sugar

It’s a busy week for Indian filmmaker Tanuja Chandra. While she is in New York to show her first English feature film "Hope and a Little Sugar" at the South Asian International Film Festival, her Bollywood movie "Zindagi Rocks" opens back home.

A block in downtown Manhattan was changed forever five years ago. And when Hindi filmmaker Tanuja Chandra was approached a couple of years later about making an English film, she decided to set it in New York and use the attack on this site as the backdrop.

Director, Hope and a Little Sugar, Tanuja Chandra told SAW, “It’s more about emotions, about the world being given to easy hatred and now so many years after 9/11 happened, I think it’s even more relevant than it was at that time.”

The director describes Hope and a Little Sugar, starring Mahima Chaudhuri, Anupam Kher and Amit Sial, as a Muslim-Sikh love story. Chandra says working on her first English feature was a liberating experience.

Tanuja adds,  “Hindi movies, especially Bollywood films, are of a specific sensibility that are geared very much towards an Indian audience. And so for me as a director, it was really interesting and a great experiment to be a part of it, where I could speak to an audience that were not just Indians.

Even as Hope and a Little Sugar enters the film festival circuit before its commercial release, a more typical Tanuja Chandra movie, "Zindagi Rocks", starring Sushmita Sen, is hitting theaters back home. “Yeah, half my heart is there, but I couldn’t miss this. It’s my first English film, so there was no way I could have missed this,” says Tanuja.

An American story, an Indian storyteller - Hope and a Little Sugar is another attempt by an Indian filmmaker to reach out to a global audience.

Indira Kannan